Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bates argues that understanding the historical relationship between medicine and science can help to clarify what science itself is, and exactly how it differs from other kinds of knowledge. In particular, it is directly relevant to the so-called "Needham question": why did the Scientific Revolution happen in western Europe, even though the East, particularly China, boasted greater achievements in technology? The question needs to be re-framed: it is not technology which made the Scientific Revolution, but mechanism. Medicine as a philosophical inquiry into life-processes, though often dismissed as impervious to the Scientific Revolution, was actually a driving force for mechanism. This is because the new mechanism of the 17th century was a fusion of revived ancient itomism with another ancient style of mechanistic thinking, which Bates called "organic mechanism" or "technism." The primary expression or organic mechanism was in living things-the focus of medical reflection. Medicine's role in developing these ideas of nature as soul in what Don Bates calls Phase I of the Western Intellectual Tradition (Antiquity to the Renaissance), had a crucial impact on the Scientific Revolution, or what Bates refers to as Phase II of the Western Intellectual Tradition. The centrality of medicine to the evolving concept of mechanism truly makes it "the soul of science."
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.068 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".